Saturn's moon Prometheus, having perturbed the planet's thin F ring, moves away as it continues in its orbit.

The gravity of potato-shaped Prometheus (86 kilometers, 53 miles across) periodically creates streamer-channels in the F ring, and the moon's handiwork can be seen in the dark channels here. To learn more and to watch a movie of this process, see PIA08397.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane. A star is visible through the rings near the center right of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 1, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.